God Bless Ketamine!

We were doing a tubal ligation aka..."tubes tied" yesterday when for whatever reason, the spinal didn't work all the way. The patient really let out a yelp when the surgeon gave her "test pinches" to see if an incision would hurt. So I did what we do when this happens. I whipped out the Ketamine. I LOVE that stuff! Give it to the patient and they go off to LaLa Land, complete with good pain relief and some mighty interesting hallucinations. It is it is similar to PCP so basically you are giving the patient a legal acid trip during surgery. In recovery, most of them comment on "seeing things" during surgery. It's always fun to tell them that it was perfectly normal and it was from some special medicine they got. Oddly enough, elves seem to be a popular hallucination that gets reported. I'm not sure if I would want to see elves during surgery, unless of course they were from the North Pole and were bringing me lots of presents!